In the latest of nine (!!!) totally negative comments on my recent pro-New Democrat post here “As I’ve Been Saying…It’s TIME!!! (Updated)” (http://www.boomantribune.com/story/2019/3/12/134739/475), centerfielddj wrote (In the false-accusative manner he or she has used countless times before on this blog.):
Please link a post from a community member who shares your explicit desire to allow States and Counties to deny the right to marriage for same sex couples.
Having a rare, enjoyably free Sunday…I basically work 7 days a week at my musical art/craft…I though I’d sit down and painstakingly refute some of those kneejerk accusations once again.
Sigh…
Read on.
Dear Centerfielddj…
I personally do not give a good goddamn which of the 7 sexes care to cohabit and/or marry in a legal sense. That’s one reason that I choose to live in this wonderfully complex and relatively free (compared to most other areas of the country) city of New York.
I also believe that people have a right to their own beliefs.
And…in majority rule.
The fractured state of this country today…culturally, politically, socially and economically…is witness to its basic problems in terms of dealing with those two concepts. The Trump regime is the lowest, worst result of this problem so far…rule by a minority that is trying to impose its own beliefs on the entire country.
I have no surefire, practical solutions to integrating those two ideas in a nation this large and this diverse other than some form of less centralized rule of law. You cannot legislate morality from a remote center…not efficiently, anyway…nor can you legislate “belief.” It just doesn’t work.
If you have some practical solutions to resolving that basic dichotomy other than the Looney Tunes farce that has been going on in Washington D.C. since the Long Coup of the assassination years…practical solutions that do not include some sort of governmental decentralization…please offer them.
If you do not…and it appears that all you really have to offer is a years-long list of complaints about my own attempts at figuring out this basic problem in this now completely multicultural nation that we laughingly call the United States…then I suppose we will all have to continue to suffer your own empty, kneejerk huffing and puffing.
So it goes.
You also write:
Feel free to link a post from another community member who shares your opposition to unemployment insurance.
If we had an adequate educational system…one that is not based on the economic position of neighborhoods (thus racially-based in this largely still segregated country)…and also an economic system that was not allowed to sell off jobs to nations with much lower wages in the name of obscene profit, our unemployment problems would diminish enormously within a couple of generations. I do not “oppose” unemployment insurance, I oppose planned unemployment in the interests of inadequate wages. Solve that problem…a problem that Ross Perot quite clearly sketched out during his presidential campaign in 1992…and massive unemployment insurance would shrink radically, needed only to sustain the unemployable.
From the NY Times coverage of the 1992 presidential debates:
Q: Yes, I’d like to direct my question to Mr. Perot. What will you do as President to open foreign markets to fair competition from American business, and to stop unfair competition here at home from foreign countries so that we can bring jobs back to the United States.
PEROT: That’s right at the top of my agenda. We’ve shipped millions of jobs overseas and we have a strange situation because we have a process in Washington where after you’ve served for a while you cash in and become a foreign lobbyist, make $30,000 a month; then take a leave, work on Presidential campaigns, make sure you got good contacts, and then go back out. Now if you just want to get down to brass tacks, the first thing you ought to do is get all these folks who’ve got these one-way trade agreements that we’ve negotiated over the years and say, “Fellows, we’ll take the same deal we gave you.” And they’ll gridlock right at that point because, for example, we’ve got international competitors who simply could not unload their cars off the ships if they had to comply — you see, if it was a two-way street — just couldn’t do it. We have got to stop sending jobs overseas.
To those of you in the audience who are business people, pretty simple: If you’re paying $12, $13, $14 an hour for factory workers and you can move your factory South of the border, pay a dollar an hour for labor, hire young — let’s assume you’ve been in business for a long time and you’ve got a mature work force — pay a dollar an hour for your labor, have no health care — that’s the most expensive single element in making a car — have no environmental controls, no pollution controls and no retirement, and you don’t care about anything but making money, there will be a giant sucking sound going south.
So we — if the people send me to Washington the first thing I’ll do is study that 2,000-page agreement and make sure it’s a two-way street. One last part here — I decided I was dumb and didn’t understand it so I called the Who’s Who of the folks who’ve been around it and I said, “Why won’t everybody go South?” They say, “It’d be disruptive.” I said, “For how long?” I finally got them up from 12 to 15 years. And I said, “well, how does it stop being disruptive?” And that is when their jobs come up from a dollar an hour to six dollars an hour, and ours go down to six dollars an hour, and then it’s leveled again. But in the meantime, you’ve wrecked the country with these kinds of deals. We’ve got to cut it out.
But we didn’t “cut it out,” and here we jolly well are, aren’t we…printing money at a disastrous rate in an attempt to stave of an economic collapse that this time would probably result in the necessity for some form of martial law.
Great work, slaves of the .01%.
Corporate-owned DemocRats and RatPublicans.
And…you finish with this doozy:
You’re welcome to find a post from another community member who shares your your support for voter ID laws.
The concept of a “voter ID”…if it were to be applied honestly and without any aims at disenfranchising various minorities…is no more radically wrong than the idea of passports or driver’s licenses.
But here we find ourselves, right back in the kettle of the original statement regarding my personal beliefs above:
I believe that people have a right to their own beliefs.
And…I believe in majority rule.
If in a seriously dispersed, large country like the U.S. the central government…on plentiful evidence…cannot and/or will not police sections of the country that use gerrymandering, voter ID laws and whatever other dirty tricks they can conjure up to effectively disenfranchise minorities?
Then that is further evidence that said government is broken and needs to be fixed.
I have been supporting Beto O’Rourke here because I think that he is the one Democratic candidate…so far, anyway…that shows promise of being able to provide a landslide, supermajority-propelled win for the rapidly changing “new” Democratic Party. Perhaps a new majority is raising its head all over this country.
We shall see, soon enough.
Do the corporate-owned mass media still have enough juice to tip the scales centerward once again?
Or have they become so patently false…from MSNBC right on through to Fox News…that enough people have stopped being seriously influenced by them to be able to seriously change this system in a lawful way?
We’ll find that out soon enough, too.
Won’t we.
You, Mr. or Ms. Centerfielddj?
Your choice of blog name says all about you that needs to be understood.
I think that you are already old news.
Centrist news.
Sincerely…
AG
P.S. Keep flogging on, though.
Somebody’s got to be wrong…
Ah yes, there’s Arthur and his “you cannot legislate morality” bullshit distraction yet again.
Get this clear, Arthur: Civil rights laws are not about legislating morality. They never have been.
It is certainly the case that moral stances of legislators and ordinary citizens motivate civil-rights legislation. But what civil-rights legislation actually does is to define penalties for ACTIONS. Not for thought crimes, not for moral stances, but for ACTIONS.
Arthur, thank you for reconfirming that you have an explicit desire to allow States and Counties to deny the right to marriage to same sex couples.
It’s also valuable for us to see that your remedy for voter ID laws which disenfranchise Americans is to move the United States to a “…less centralized rule of law.” Here’s yet another defense of your desire to allow States and portions of States to secede. Of course, this remedy would make the denial of the ballot much, much, much worse for many Americans, but you seem to not give a flying fuck about that. This is very careless of you.
“You cannot legislate morality from a remote center” and a call to allow local “majority rule” are primary appeals which have been made by the worst racists, sexists and economic royalists on Earth to help them sell maximally oppressive and violent policies. You share a regressive, destructive philosophy with Randall Terry, David Duke and others here.
In a real-world demonstration of Joel’s point above, leaders of The Trump Organization are largely free to express personal hatred for African-Americans and publicly advocate for imposing the death penalty on a group of African-Americans even after they were finally exonerated by the justice system which betrayed them for over a decade, but the Organization cannot broadly deny housing to African-Americans without penalty.
A problem that I’m bringing to the community for discussion is that your “…attempts at figuring out this basic problem…” of governance are causing you to propose solutions which are very bad, solutions which are extremely regressive, solutions which place you far to the right of the “centrists” you so enthusiastically attempt to label and criticize. In your actual views, not your liberal cosplay, you are far closer to Donald Trump than Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.
Literally no one in this community appears to agree with your positions on these issues. Many of us find it repellent that you continually avoid dealing with the fact that if your desire to have the Federal government cede the field to oligarchs, racists and sexists were implemented it would badly and much more deeply hurt vulnerable Americans. But at least your “neoliberal centrist” smears and attempts to portray yourself as a critic of Democrats from the Left are again shown to be the preposterous frauds which they are.
I am disappointed that you are trying to enter an evasive non-denial denial here of your view that unemployment insurance saps personal initiative. You have made and defended this claim here. Your posts can be found by community members and linked here if necessary. It would be best if you decided to come clean on this as well, instead of blurring your position as you attempt to do here.
It’s amusing that you continually attempt to hold up Ross Perot as some sort of champion of the working class. Perot was one of the richest people in America. He didn’t accomplish that by compensating his workforces particularly well or allowing workers at his businesses to organize Unions without severe opposition.
What was the plank in the Perot campaign about Labor rights? It’s interesting that you appear to not know the answer. I’ll clue you in: Perot did not call to give workers greater direct power, and did not support the idea of giving workers in the growing service sector of the job market a better opportunity to gain Union representation and collective bargaining rights. Unless workers have real leverage in the relationships with their employers, no trade policy will bring them decent compensation and safe, dignified working conditions.
“…less centralized rule of law” is just a transparent euphemism for “states’ rights”.
“States’ rights” in its turn being, of course, just as transparent a euphemism for allowing “legal” discrimination against some of their citizens, including violations of their civil rights under the Constitution. So unsurprising ag’d be for that!
In light of which “careless” seems massively over-generous!
RE: the exonerated “Central Park Five”. Trump very famously took out a full-page ad in the NYT calling to “Bring Back the Death Penalty” (I believe that’s a direct quote) for those falsely accused and convicted victims of the (in)justice system. Then, even after they’d been definitively exonerated by DNA evidence (i.e., as definitive as exoneration can possibly get!), he continued declaring their guilt, citing (clearly racist and belonging nowhere near any agency responsible for administration of justice, if indeed they exist at all and aren’t just more made-up Trump sockpuppets) “sources” within NYPD and/or prosecutors’ office saying they still believed the five guilty. Digby has written about this and reproduced that NYT ad numerous times.
You forgot “scare quotes” around “solutions”.
RE:
Yup. Duh! Spot-on. Obvious to anyone paying the slightest attention to the many far-right-glibertarian, bigot-enabling stances he’s repeatedly taken, while posing as a “true progressive” and absurdly appointing himself sole arbiter of who else qualifies for that classification(LOL!).
. . . was meant for ag (obviously!). I changed it back to “none” before hitting “rate all”, but it still “took”, and now system won’t allow correction of it. Sorry. No offense intended.
You can change the 0 to another rating, such as a 4. That is all that can be done under those circumstances if you don’t want to leave a zero in place. I’ve accidentally done something along those lines in the past, and that is the process I used to handle the situation.
. . . Thought I remembered trying that before and not having it work. Apparently not. Appreciate the headsup.
No worries. Happy to be of help.
. . . headline of this “standalone article” [LOL! Seriously, that’s how ag routinely refers to these turds he spams this place with! I kid you not!] to validly arrive at that conclusion.
AG, here’s my response to Ross Perot’s arguments: International trade is believed by economists to be a benefit to both parties due to comparative advantage. But there are caveats that are often ignored, the big one being if the trade creates unemployment. (Another one being that real comparative advantage is actually not all that common.)
There are two ways to approach this problem: eliminate the trade or fix the unemployment.
The view of some economists is that unemployment is a waste of a valuable real resource (people’s industriousness and ingenuity) as well as a source of real misery and social dysfunction. In other words, an economic system that doesn’t have a job for everyone who wants one is failing one of its basic functions.
Personally, I think that a country should try to be as self-sufficient as it practically can be.
MMT’s solution to this is a Job Guarantee.